Wrongful death suits have cost Veterans Affairs over $200 million since 9/11 - report

The US Department of Veteran Affairs has paid out more than $200 million in wrongful death payments to military families who needlessly lost their loved ones in the years since 9/11, according to a new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Veterans Affairs (VA) is a federal government-run organization
that is primarily responsible for caring for veterans after they
leave the service. Along with overseeing the National Cemetery
Administration, the VA also heads the Veterans Health
Administration and the Veterans Benefits Administration.

Yet according to a report published Thursday, the Center for
Investigative Reporting (CIR) has discovered that since the 2001
terrorist attacks, the VA has doled out payments to almost 1,000
families whose loved ones died after they were either denied
treatment or released from VA treatment.

The examples are as diverse as they are difficult to read
through. Recent incidents included veterans of the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan taking their own lives after they were unable to
receive mental health treatment from hospitals. Others involved
Vietnam veterans and, in many cases, elderly World War II
veterans.

Doris Street, 86, told CIR’s Aaron Glantz that she received a
$135,000 settlement in 2010 after her brother died in a VA
nursing home two years earlier. Ms. Street said her brother, Carl
Glaze, had served in WWII but his life ended after he slipped in
a bathroom and became paralyzed from the neck down, dying nine
days later.

“It wasn’t about the money, I just thought that somebody
should be held accountable,” she said. “I had asked them
not to leave him alone, and then they left him in the bathroom.
We all get upset when these things happen.”

Negligence, wrongfully denying mental health treatment, failure
to disclose relevant health information to the public, and other
serious infractions are among the issues that have cost veterans
their lives. More than six million men and women turn to the VA
for care each year.

The issue has become serious enough to warrant a hearing with the
House Committee on Veteran’s Affairs, which will investigate
preventable deaths in a hearing scheduled for April 9. The same
committee held a hearing on the matter last year, when they
wondered why – after a Legionnaire’s disease outbreak at a
Pittsburgh hospital killed six veterans and left 21 others ill –
the VA regional director was given a $63,000 bonus, according to
CIR.

“It’s not enough for VA to simply compensate the families of
those who died,” Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) said at the same
time. “In order to provide real closure for those struck by
these heartbreaking preventable deaths, VA needs to hold fully
accountable the employees who allowed patients to slip through
the cracks.”

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki responded to that
assertion by saying that 6,000 VA employees were
“involuntarily removed” from their jobs over the past
two years.

Still, according to independent legal experts who spoke to CIR,
the 1,000 lawsuits are only a fraction of the veterans who have
lost their lives because of malpractice. When those families try
to file suit, however, they must endure a long administrative
process that can drag on for months or years only to end with no
financial damages awarded to the family.

Spokeswoman Victoria Dillon told CIR in a written statement that
“any adverse incident for a veteran within our care is one
too many” and that those preventable deaths are not a fair
assessment when considering how many veterans are properly cared
for. When that does happen, she said, “we conduct a thorough
review to understand what happened, prevent similar incidents in
the future, and share lessons learned across the system,”
adding that the VA is “committed to continuous
improvement.”

Earlier this week, the VA announced it had sliced its backlog of
medical claims by 44 percent since March 2013, cutting the number
of processing claims delayed for more than 125 days from 611,000
to 344,000. The number of claims has skyrocketed under US
President Obama after the administration enacted new rules which
permit more Agent Orange claims and loosened restrictions for
veterans who returned from Iraq or Afghanistan.

The agency also reversed a decision that would have cut funding
to homeless veterans who left the service without honorable
discharge. VA officials said they pulled the funding after
conducting a legal review of the eligibility laws, but turned an
about-face after pressure from community groups and questions
from media outlets, specifically USA Today.

Approximately 58,000 veterans spent at least one night without a
place to sleep in 2013, according to the US Department of Housing
and Urban Development. Of those, about 10 percent left the
military without honorable discharge and therefore faced
difficulty in collecting health benefits from the VA. The
motivation for the cuts, which were abandoned after being
noticed, was especially confusing after President Obama said his
administration would try to end veteran homelessness by 2015.

“This is federal bureaucracy at its most heartless,”
Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the Senate Budget Committee
chairman and a senior member on the Senate Veterans Affairs
Committee, told USA Today. “It defies all common sense.”